How Sweden's youth homes nurtured killers, creating Europe's gun crime capital
How Sweden's youth homes nurtured killers, creating Europe's gun crime capital
The killer was only 14 and had lived in youth homes as a ward of the authorities since he was eight.
A year ago, a gang helped the boy escape, put him up in a hotel and gave him cannabis, food and new clothes. Six days later, gang members told him it was time to repay them for their kindness. They had a job for him.
Together with another youth, the boy, who as a juvenile cannot be identified, shot dead a 33-year-old Hells Angels biker. He was convicted by a court which described the case as a gangland contract killing.
As he was too young to be sentenced, he was handed back to social services and sent to another youth home.
Sweden has long prided itself on one of the world's most generous social safety nets, with a state that looks after vulnerable people at all stages of life.
But these days it also has another distinction: by far the highest per capita rate of gun violence in the EU. Last year 55 people were shot dead in 363 separate shootings in a country of just 10 million people. By comparison, there were just six fatal shootings in the three other Nordic countries - Norway, Finland and Denmark - combined.
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So he killed a dude And they sent him back to the youth home? Are they just stupid or what?
The kid is a victim.
And in Sweden what in the US would be called a "juvenile detention center" would fall under the term of "youth home". He wasn't returned to the same one.
I don't think they're exactly leaving him unguarded, being underage, there isn't another type of facility suited for legally incarcerating him. These facilities essentially double as juvie and orphanages.
Mixing kids who are simply in government care with ones that are violent, was never a good idea though. These two systems should be separate, because it's now turning the former into the latter.
According to accounts for this story from eight sources including a former gang member, several youth home workers, prosecutors and criminologists, the homes have turned into recruiting grounds for gangs, who use them to enlist killers too young to be jailed.
Gangs have essentially found a loophole for legal murder. Get a child to do it.
They're the ones masterminding this shit. It's not like these actual children, with government rooves over their heads, are taking on contract killing to make ends meet.
Mixing kids who are simply in government care with ones that are violent, was never a good idea though.
That's the issue here. There's a huge difference between the kids in state care because they are orphaned and the kids who get sent to juvenile detention centers or even what we call in the US "alternative schooling."
Not as big a difference as you think there is. Both are children needing love, acceptance, guidance and healing from massive traumas you can't even begin to imagine.
Ok but the government seems to have let it happen.
Yeah, mixing violent youths with kids who just don't have families seems to have consequences.
I disagree with the kid being a victim though. Even a 5 year old knows and understands what death is.
Yeah.
Kill that guy for us, or we'll kill you, you owe us, sorta requires understanding death.
You think these kids take the "deal" knowing where it leads? Even some adults are easy to manipulate... so a fourteen-year-old?
I'd agree that some teen that kills of their own volition isn't innocent... But there's a literal gang involved that is actively grooming kids for murder.
As for the government letting it happen, agreed. Modern politics, legislation, and government executive branches address problems at a snails pace. Often actively causing them because politicians refuse to enact laws based on what is known, rather than what they feel.
Kinda like you, feeling like the victimhood of this actual child shouldn't be acknowledged.
An attempt to address this with such a tainted perspective surely wouldn't cause problems. /S
But are they not warned about this exact scenario? They definitely should be.
If the govt knows that happens then they should warn them says they gave em weed and an apartment building. If you warned the kids about that they would know "Hey if you accept that you're going to have to kill someone"
You really can't see how a child can fall through the cracks of a fucked government care system and fall in with people who would take advantage of them?
Just warn all the kids off strangers, no way some won't hear it, ignore it, or literally do the opposite of what they're told for stupid childish reasons.
Brilliant thinking my friend, lets just tell all our kids not to get kidnapped, human trafficking, solved!
And before you get semantic on me, manipulating a child into coming with you against their own interests even as it is then not taking them against their will, is still kidnapping.
The kid is a victim.
And I'm spider man
That's less than a non-response. Self-inflicted sabotage of your own credibility.
Openly advertising your inability to understand why you disagree well enough to make others comprehend your stance with actual sentences that mean things.
So you try to pretend that a witty remark counts for something.
If you ever genuinely tried good-faith discussion, you'd see how little sense your position makes as you'd struggle to put together arguments that actually convince anyone.
Obviously this person shouldn't be walking free, and needs serious rehabilitation.
But the same way adult ex-cons who end up back in prison in the US within months of release due to a fucked justice system, are victims, this literal child groomed into a tool to enact violence at the behest of others, is even moreso.
It's the system that's the problem. It was built for a society with a very homogenous and pacifist culture profile. That society no longer exists.
The majority in Sweden is going through a rather rude awakening right now and our systems are going to break a lot whilst our politicians struggle to bring them in line with our new reality.
Not every nation follows America's hardline view of kids and crime.
There's a whole world between American style brutal sentencing and whatever nonsense Sweden is doing. Neither seem to be working
It all has to with with money, ie: if you invest in proper care for the kids = it costs more than just warehousing/condemning them to the bare minimum.
I was more thinking of what to do with underage murderers and the sort
See I hear you except when it becomes full on straight up murder.
And the other commenter talked about how those homes (more like facilities I have learned) the kid is in are recruitments from local gangs to get kids to kill people and go unjailed.
Maybe they shouldn't take America's hard-line view on kids and crime but I'd say the soft view they are using now isn't working very well.
And so what this kid grows up into an adult and then just gets to go back into the world, having killed someone who was innocent because a gang told him too?
Sounds like its a great policy.
Kids need love, acceptance and guidance from adults who are capable of that. If they don't get that from those who should be giving it, they are open to abuse from those who will use and abuse them.
Those kids aren't being recruited to murder anyone in the beginning. They're being given the things they need, then they're being manipulated to believe they owe their lives to the ones who gave it, and must do what they're told to repay the debt.
Kids don't have adult brains to think through the consequences of their choices. And the adults in charge of them, specifically politicians and other idjits who couldn't give a rat's ass about them most of the time, are failing those kids at every turn.